{"id":51786,"date":"2021-02-24T11:15:12","date_gmt":"2021-02-24T11:15:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/grist.org\/?p=499587"},"modified":"2021-02-24T11:15:12","modified_gmt":"2021-02-24T11:15:12","slug":"air-pollution-kills-naming-that-problem-can-help-us-tackle-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/02\/24\/air-pollution-kills-naming-that-problem-can-help-us-tackle-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Air pollution kills. Naming that problem can help us tackle it."},"content":{"rendered":"

In December, a British coroner ruled that the cause of 9-year-old Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah\u2019s death<\/a> in 2013 was \u201ctoxic air pollution.\u201d On its face this may not seem all that important, given that an estimated 7 million people<\/a> die annually from air pollution and more than 90 percent of the world\u2019s population breathes in hazardous air<\/a> every day. And yet Ella\u2019s certificate of death<\/a> is the first to formally list toxic air pollution as the cause of death.<\/p>\n

Ella\u2019s case is part of a growing recognition that human-produced toxic pollution is causing a substantial global health crisis<\/a>, and it has substantial implications for environmental policymaking and for the legal liabilities that pollution producers may face in the future.<\/p>\n

If the recent cases surrounding glyphosate \u2014 the herbicide pioneered by Monsanto in its infamous Roundup weedkiller<\/a> \u2014 are any guide, Ella\u2019s case could trigger a potential windfall of cases. After a California court awarded $289 million in damages to Dewayne Johnson<\/a>, a groundskeeper who used glyphosate for decades, civil cases mounted by the thousands. As a result, Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in 2018, agreed to a $10 billion settlement<\/a> for all other cases in the U.S..<\/p>\n

In the U.K., Ella\u2019s case has already sparked local action. The British government recently stated that in response to the verdict it would allocate $5.2 billion<\/a> towards cleaning up vehicle transport emissions in cities and reducing urban nitrogen dioxide levels \u2014 the pollutant named as partially responsible for Ella\u2019s death in the coroner\u2019s report. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said<\/a>, \u201cMinisters and the previous mayor have acted too slowly in the past, but they must now learn the lessons from the coroner\u2019s ruling and do much more to tackle the deadly scourge of air pollution in London and across the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Living in London, Ella was like many urban-dwelling children who are more likely to develop asthma or other respiratory illnesses due to early and chronic exposure to air pollution from cars, buses, and industry. The coroner concluded that a complex of different noxious gases and particles in the air she breathed daily caused the asthma attack that led to her death.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

While children\u2019s respiratory systems are more vulnerable, adults do not escape the reach of air pollution in cities, where higher rates of dementia<\/a> and Alzheimer\u2019s<\/a> are linked to exposure to particulate matter of 2.5 microns or less in size. It\u2019s also one of the strongest correlates<\/a> of death or hospitalization due to COVID-19. Spikes in particulate matter, along with other air pollutants like nitrogen oxides, are associated with<\/a> higher death rates in general in the days following exposure.<\/p>\n

Here in the United States, there\u2019s been relatively little attention paid to Ella\u2019s case. Given the pandemic, domestic political struggles, and the transition to a new presidential administration, there is certainly an overload of news competing for attention. But with the renewed focus on climate change and environmental justice signaled by the Biden administration<\/a> and among U.S. policymakers, Ella\u2019s case could be the perfect catalyst for environmental justice, in which poverty, race, and environmental risk exposure intersect. Ella\u2019s case sets a legal precedent to do something about it.<\/p>\n

Death certificates fall under the purview of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Thanks to guidance issued by the Obama administration, environmental exposure may be listed as a contributing factor to a death, but there is currently no code<\/a> to attribute the immediate cause of death to a toxic pollution exposure. The Biden administration could issue guidance to the CDC to change that, which could shift the way people think about pollution.<\/p>\n

There are more than 450,000<\/a> toxic sites<\/a> across the U.S. and more than 20,000 active permitted polluters<\/a>. We need to amend and bolster current domestic environmental legislation to hold polluters accountable and to make the changes permanent, rather than executive orders and programs that can be rolled back by a future administration.<\/p>\n

Biden\u2019s order<\/a> to build a White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy and an environmental justice interagency council is a formidable start to mitigating and remediating toxic pollution and its unequal distribution. Additionally, the Biden administration needs to put toxic air pollution on the international environmental agenda, for example leading the charge in creating a corollary international agreement to the Paris Climate Agreement.<\/p>\n

Doing so would signal a shift from treating the outcomes of climate change to treating the causes. For example, in early 2016, the Department of Housing and Urban Development deemed the Isle de Jean Charles along the Louisiana Gulf Coast too risky to live on and granted $48 million<\/a> to the community to relocate, for the first time codifying the term \u201cclimate refugee<\/a>.\u201d But what could have been the start to a long process of redistributive environmental justice to communities threatened by climate change was quickly doused by the incoming Trump team.<\/p>\n

In that case and in the case of glyphosate, it is the outcomes of pollution that were addressed \u2014 either by restitution or relocation \u2014 rather than the root cause.<\/p>\n

Ella\u2019s tragic death puts a face to a problem that will be responsible for many more deaths in the future if we don\u2019t change our current policies. Let\u2019s not let this opportunity for systemic change pass us by.<\/p>\n

This story was originally published by Grist<\/a> with the headline Air pollution kills. Naming that problem can help us tackle it.<\/a> on Feb 24, 2021.<\/p>\n

This post was originally published on Grist<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The U.K. set a precedent for listing toxic pollution as a cause of death. It\u2019s the catalyst we need to hold polluters accountable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2634,3718,510,9884,1287,33,9885],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51786"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51786"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51786\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52088,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51786\/revisions\/52088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}